


Dig

by runningreader



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Journalism, F/M, Fraternities & Sororities, Rape is discussed but not depicted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:21:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24182782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runningreader/pseuds/runningreader
Summary: Every girl on campus knows that when you attend a frat party, you need to be on the lookout.And Rey is done with that. She's going to expose the Greek system's normalization of sexual assault. She is going to take them down in a well-researched and articulate article in the school paper.It's black and white: What is happening here is wrong, and there needs to be a change.Or, at least, that's the plan.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	1. Surveillance

**Author's Note:**

> Please note: I actually don't truly hate fraternities and sororities. My fiance was in a frat; my sister was in a sorority. I think they can offer a lot! 
> 
> They can also be problematic.

Rey wasn’t undercover, but she also wasn’t trying to be the center of attention. 

In fact, one of the greatest disappointments of her career in journalism so far was how little of it was undercover. As it turns out, investigative journalism meant mostly sitting behind a computer and looking for tiny discrepancies in data and perfectly engineering questions to get the answers you needed. 

But still: sometimes you needed to fade into the background when you were trying to get the real feel for things. 

In her current environment, that meant that Rey was wearing a skirt a little tighter and shorter than she would usually choose for herself. 

At the first frat house she had canvassed, she had shown up in jeans and a tank top, thinking that was plain enough to keep people from paying too much attention to. As it turns out, not attending a single frat party during her freshman year meant she didn’t have a great concept of what they really were like. Jeans and a tank weren’t that unusual, but when coupled with the fact that she had spent the hour she had spent in the basement pressed against the wall not touching a single drink had gotten her more than a few weird looks.

Not really what she had been going for. 

So this weekend, she had dug out a skirt-- even though it was starting to get brisk out-- forced Kaydel out of the newspaper's office and along with her so that she didn’t look totally antisocial, and grabbed a cup of foamy beer that she pretended to sip as they pushed through the mobs of people.

“I’m still not sure why you’re doing this,” Kaydel remarked as yet another beer-bellied twenty-year-old jostled against them in his journey to the dance floor. 

“I need to get enough context to really set the scene,” Rey replied, surveying the room and taking mental notes on every detail. She knew well enough that spending too much time writing in a notebook or even taking notes on her phone would certainly look weird. 

Kaydel took a sip of the punch she had taken and barely restrained a grimace. “You really think you are going to get any of these fools to confess to anything shady?”

“I need to. It’s important.” Ever since Rey had heard inklings that a bunch of the frats had some intense hazing practices, she had been dying to expose them. 

“The only way any of these guys are going to give you the time of day is if you open your legs.” Rey could barely hear her friend over the thrum of the bass through the speakers, but she got the gist of what she said. “And that breaks basically every rule of responsible journalism. You can’t pull a  _ Thank You for Smoking _ on me over here.”

“And that’s precisely the problem we are looking at.” Rey scanned the room again, feeling a bit like she was back at her part-time lifeguarding gig. Checking to see who were potential risk factors. Who might get pulled under at any second. 

Her eyes stopped at a group of girls she assumed were sorority pledges, all tottering on too tall wedges, grinding up against each other. More than a few guys were distracted from the nearby pong game. Rey would keep her eyes on them, but in general, she knew they did not meet the requirements that most guys would target. There were too many of them, for one.

She noticed another girl laying on a pool table in the corner, boys slurping shots of something poured out of a plastic bottle out of her crop-top exposed belly button. She was the only girl over there, which made Rey warier, but at the distance Rey was, she still seemed to be totally in control over her actions. She was sitting up and laughing between the shots, pulling down her skirt as it rode up. 

This was a dangerous place for all of its laughter, though. Rey knew it would be easy to let her guard down and just join in on the fun. It would only take a cup of the punch that she had seen in Kaydel’s hand for her inhibitions to be down and for her to forget that she was in a lion’s den. 

Rey had seen this first hand. She had been awoken one morning that fall by her roommate’s tears. She had barely been conscious as she mumbled, “What’s going on?” as she moved over to Rose’s bed. She had just assumed that the girl was homesick, to be honest.

“Paige is in the hospital.” Rey suddenly felt every nerve in her body buzz with anxiety. That was one way to wake up. “I’ve… I’ve got to go get her.” Rose had stumbled out of bed, pulling on sweats and staring at the open drawer, crying even harder. 

“Is she okay? I’ll come with you. What happened?” Rey was still perched at the end of the extra-long twin. She peered at her watch. It was 6:30 on Sunday morning. 

Rose just cried harder, toying with the necklace that always hung from her neck. Rey knew that Paige had a matching one and wondered what the state of it was. “She’ll be fine. I mean, I think she’ll be fine.” The words came between choking sobs. “She’s been raped.”

All of those nerves that were buzzing before struck Rey like needles across her skin.  _ Rape _ . She knew the statistics. That nearly one in five women was raped during their lifetime. But it was still weird to see that statistic coming to life in front of your eyes. You hear those numbers and you still think,  _ That’s not me, though. That’s not my friend. I don't know them. It will never happen. _ Until that shocking moment that it was you, it was your friends. It did happen.

And yet, she managed to keep it together, to fold a pair of soft sweatpants and an old t-shirt around a pair of clean underwear and a sports bra, to shove them into a backpack, and walk that backpack across town to the hospital, hand tightly clasped around Rose’s the whole way.

Rey had sat outside the room as the sisters cried. She only heard bits and pieces of the story, and then Rey called their Lyft to take them back to the dorms. 

She didn’t ask Paige about it on that silent ride. She just decided to take revenge. 

Rey had waltzed into  _ The Resistance _ ’s office the next day with her pitch for a story. She was going to uncover the sexual assaults that threaded through the Greek system. This would be her revenge. 

There weren’t many (well, any) members of any frats on the paper’s staff, but there was one sorority girl who admitted quietly that it was a problem but that she wouldn’t play any larger role. 

Amilyn had raised her eyebrows at her but looked mildly impressed. "We'll make sure to double-check all your facts, but don't do anything that puts us at risk." The editor brushed lavender hair behind her ear. "I mean, I believe women as a general rule, but we can't get ourselves into a Duke lacrosse situation." Rey was constantly amazed by the senior's ability to see completely unfazed by anything presented to her. Someone could propose the most ridiculous story, and she would calmly hear them out and even give them a few days to start writing before she poked holes in every single element of it. So having confirmation from her didn't really give Rey any confidence. "And you'll still have to stick to one of the other beats," she added as her pitch came to an end, "if this story is going to take more than a couple of days, which I can only imagine it will."

Finn had been far more helpful. He had only joined the staff this year, but he had made it all the way through rush the previous year and had some ideas on where she could get intel. "You need to look at them widely," he informed her, leaning over to her station after the pitch meeting ended, "but you'll definitely want to spend some time with the Delts."

"Was that what you were?" Rey asked, already pulling up various chapters' websites.

"No no no," he quickly assured her. "No. I was Phi Nu. Honestly, decent guys for the most part." Rey loved how anyone could ask Finn anything, and they would get his true thoughts immediately. She had seen him interviewing people in action, and his earnestness immediately put his subjects at ease and got them to open up. Something she could probably get better at. "But I've heard some wild stories about the Delts."

So had probably everyone on campus. Rey could fill a book, or at least certainly more than an article, with the stories of the Delts.

But journalism wasn't about reporting stories. It was about reporting the truth. 

And there were few better ways to get to the truth than with good old surveillance. 

“Not thirsty?” A deep voice interrupted Rey from her mental note-taking. 

She turned around to find a tall, dark-haired man peering down at her. Where had Kaydel gotten off to? Rey saw the twin top buns bobbing up and down as she talked with a girl a few feet away. She brought her attention back to her new companion. 

_ Ben Solo _ , she thought, running her brain through the dozens of pictures she had examined online. His eyes jerked to her full cup, and she quickly took a deep glug of it. She tried not to choke on the foam as it filled her mouth.  _ Senior. President of whatever frat she was currently in-- Delta something something-- everyone just called them the Delts. Vice president of the Greek council. Goes by some ridiculous nickname. Son of Leia Organa, editor-in-chief of  _ The Falcon _ and her hero _ .

What her research had neglected to inform her was of exactly how tall he was. And how it looked like his pecs were going to burst through his black v-neck. 

She tried to play it cool. “Just distracted.” 

He stood silently for another moment. Rey took another sip of her beer, thinking she was doing a pretty good job of playing the part. She adjusted her skirt slightly. “So, like, what’s your name?” She let her words slide slightly from one to the next, hopefully implying this was not the first beer she had sipped from that night. Would batting her eyelashes be too much?

“Kylo,” he responded tersely, his attention already slipping from her and scanning the room in the same way she had been a few moments prior.  _ Kylo, so that was the weird nickname _ . 

“Kylo!” she exclaimed, letting her mouth linger on the o and leaning in a bit closer to him. Though Rey wasn’t going to have sex to get information, Kaydel had a point. A little feigned attraction might get her far. “That’s a cool name!”

“Sure.” She wasn’t even sure he had listened to what she had said. He brushed her to the side and crossed the room. Rey was left alone. She took a sip of her beer in earnest this time; she had nothing else better to do. Thankfully, Kaydel was back at her side moments later. 

“You get anything out of the Delta Devil?”

“Nada.”

“Bummer. I am shocked he didn’t just reveal all of their fraternal secrets on a chance meeting at a crowded frat party.” Rey rolled her eyes and went back to surveying the room. Ben-- Kylo?-- was leaning against the bar and talking with a pale guy with light red hair. Rey tried to place him in all of the faces she had cataloged so far, but she couldn’t recall his name in the middle of the clamor. The grinding girls had disappeared, and the boys were back to playing an ultra-competitive game of pong. The line for the bathroom had doubled. The girl who had been on the pool table was now pressing kisses down the neck of some guy in the corner of the room. 

“Well, while all of your efforts were falling short, I got information for you.” Rey pulled herself away from the scene to listen to her friend. “That girl I was talking to? She’s a Sig. They have a big mixer next weekend with these guys.” 

“We’ve got to get into that mixer,” Rey asserted, taking one last sip of her beer before turning to the stairs to make their escape from the stench of stale beer and sweat.

“Pretty sure this is your story, and I never signed up for trying to take down the most powerful groups on campus,” Kaydel responded as they headed up the stairs. “But after tonight, maybe I’m better suited for this task. Maybe I should take over.” Rey turned around to shoot her friend a dirty look. Kaydel only smirked and shrugged in response, gently smacking Rey on the butt as they continued upwards. “You do look better in a skirt though.”

As Rey turned back around, she swore she could feel eyes boring into her from across the room.


	2. Risk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been a bit slower to write lately for a whole variety of reasons, so I apologize for how long it took me to get to the second chapter of this! School duties are officially out of the way, so hopefully that will motivate me to get on a more consistent writing schedule.

Coruscant U wasn’t a huge school, nor was it known for having a particularly raucous party scene. However, when a couple thousand young adults were jammed into a town that primarily existed to support their education system, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do than drink. 

Rey had entered the previous year thinking that she would probably live the life she had throughout high school: generally not drinking, not because of any distaste for it but because the opportunity rarely arose. 

She was wrong. Alcohol was the social lubricant for every group on campus, or so it seemed. It was omnipresent and omnipotent. Free beer was really all you needed to get full attendance at an event. And so, the opportunities for Rey to get drunk were exponentially higher than they were for her in high school.

Then again, could a number actually be exponentially higher than zero? Her high school classmates had eyed her with a sense of unease-- this girl who had entered their small town school sophomore year, with no idea of what had happened to her parents. And Rey hadn’t sought out ways to explain herself or stand out. She looked to the future. She knew there were three months between her 18th birthday and graduation where she had to just pray for generosity from her foster parents for a roof over her head. She wasn’t going to do anything to risk that. 

But now that she was in college, it was kind of a different story. She was her own person now; everything around her belonged to Rey and Rey only, scrounged together and saved for after years of working in a drive-thru line. And even though she was paying for very little of her college education, she still felt like she owned it. After all, those were her grades, her essays that had cobbled together enough scholarships to bring this entire experience within her grasp. 

And one of the best things about owning herself was that she no longer had to play it totally safe. She could have that drink at a  _ Resistance _ staff party. If she got in trouble, she had only herself to blame, and life was all about measured risks.

Owning herself meant she could pitch a riskier story rather than agreeing to follow the sub-par wrestling team for another season.

She was far too acquainted with the smell of perspiration and PVC after last year to do that again. 

It was time she seized her life rather than just focus on living.

Rey had felt she had acquired enough background information from the parties she had observed to start writing at least the opening paragraph of her article, but the document stared at her blankly from behind the circulation desk at the library. 

She sighed and looked back at her notes-- jotted hurriedly the second she had absconded to her dorm room after each party. What set these parties apart from the ones that she typically went to? Why did this culture lend itself to a higher rate of sexual assault?

Or did it even? All she had to go off of was one personal connection and some other bits and pieces of anecdotal evidence. Not really the proof she needed. Was it even enough to base a story off of?

If this was how it felt to take risks, Rey was now wondering if she should just return to her safe way of living. Wrestling season hadn’t started yet. She bet she could get Amylin to give it back to her. She would even take track in the spring-- those long hours in blistering sun or torrential downpours that everyone on staff dreaded. 

She picked up the pile of books that she had scanned back in at the beginning of her shift. Sure, she could instead switch to working on something productive-- like that Stats 101 homework she was dreading-- but these books also needed reshelving and she didn’t feel like staring at a screen for a second longer. 

Screens judged you. Books didn’t. 

As it turns out, pushing around a heavy cart of books was exactly what Rey needed to clear her brain and reset her thinking. She could do this. She just needed more intel. The mixer this weekend would provide that.

Rey just needed a way in. She determined a few options as she moved from the top shelf of the cart to the second:

  1. Be honest. Say that she was doing a piece for _The Resistance_ on frat culture and ask if she could observe the party and interview its attendees. Even though this was the most honest option, even Rey knew that she should probably avoid the words “sexual assault” if she had any chance of this one working.
  2. Be slightly less honest. Say that she was working for _The Resistance_ and somehow stroke their egos into thinking it was going to be a complimentary piece. 
  3. Snag an invite to the party. Find a frat boy, seduce him (???), have him bring her along.
  4. Sneak into the party. Either subtly join in on the Sigs and hope they didn’t notice her or wait until everyone was too drunk to notice an additional attendee. 



Every option was out of Rey’s comfort zone. Honestly, if she didn’t have to go back into a sticky basement one more time, she would probably be happy. But she certainly wasn’t going to seize upon any interesting stories from working the circ desk. 

She actually did then take a moment to consider if she could unravel any interesting plots based on the check-out patterns of the students, but she quickly realized that this was a digression and a complete fantasy. 

As Rey stepped onto the elevator to move to the next floor, she texted Finn her four ideas. He always hung out longer than needed after staff meetings, so she had caught him earlier in the week to share what she had observed at the parties so far. He had been more helpful than she had anticipated, giving insight into what were regular occurrences versus what seemed to be anomalies at each one. Body shots? Normal. Boys smashing beer cans against their head? Normal. Mooning campus security as they walked past? Surprisingly abnormal.

Even as she typed out her options, she was pretty sure what Finn was going to advise. It would be right in line with the words of her hero: “The best reporter is the one no one sees.”

Then again, Rey was pretty sure that Leia Organa was referring to actual warzones rather than drunken debauchery. 

She had hoped that Finn would get back to her before her short elevator ride was over, but she had no such luck. Even so, she started making a list of what she would have to do to prepare for this endeavor. 

Good reporters always had checklists. 

She established at least six things for this list as she wove between the stacks, reshelving books on topics both familiar and completely alien to her. 

When you spend your entire life never completely sure how long you are going to be in a certain place or how long someone is going to want to spend with you, you get really good at entertaining yourself. 

Rey was a pro at getting lost in her thoughts. For the most part, this worked to her advantage. She would spend hours drafting and rewriting articles and essays in her head before even putting her fingers on the keyboard-- to the point that when she did sit down to write them, they often emerged fully fledged, like Athena erupting from Zeus’s head. 

However, sometimes it also meant she lacked the observation skills that someone not creating deities in their mind possessed. 

Which meant she rammed a cart of heavy texts into unsuspecting library-goers. 

A “Watch where you’re going!” interrupted Rey from her checklist. That gravelly voice was familiar. She jerked her head up, much like a rabbit who sensed a hawk was circling overhead.

Kylo Ren was standing in front of her cart, massaging his thigh.  _ Ben Solo _ , she mentally corrected herself. There was no way that any respectable journalist was going to let a source go by anything other than the name that would actually track them throughout their lives. 

He pushed the cart back at her with probably a little more force than necessary. Rey hadn’t been moving that fast-- there was no way it had actually injured him. However, she kept it under control as he glared at her from between curtains of dark hair. 

“Sorry!” she grimaced, taking a few steps back. She looked at the next book in her stack. Unfortunately, it belonged right in the middle of the shelf that Ben Solo was now aggressively rifling through. He let a few books fall to the floor with resounding slaps. Rey quickly went from feeling apologetic to just peeved. Who did he think was going to be responsible for putting those books back? At least this was a carpeted area of the library, so the sound didn’t reverberate through the entire building. Not that she thought this dark presence would care an ounce about disrupting others’ studies. 

When his search moved onto the neighboring shelf but showed no signs of letting up, Rey decided to return the other books on her cart and return to this one later. 

She returned what she thought was a reasonable amount of time later to find Ben Solo still sitting in that aisle, surrounded by stacks of hardcovers, some splayed open to the index, some propped against the shelves. Only a few survivors remained on the shelves, looking like lone soldiers staggering home from war. 

Ben himself was leaned back against the shelf, eyes closed, exposing a long neck and a prominent adam's apple. At this moment, he looked almost peaceful-- not the ominous figure looming over her in a basement or a bluster ripping books from their homes. 

She tiptoed gingerly over the askew books to quietly place the book in her hands back on the shelf where it belonged-- her legs looking like she was playing a game of twister in order to avoid trampling tomes. Should she start picking up the other books, or was he using them? It would be her job to reshelve them at some point, but did she want to risk that wrath? 

Was he asleep? 

Rey retreated to where she could stand firmly and faked a cough. 

Ben Solo did not move.

She located a particularly thick book-- one of those ones that was so old that the title was no longer legible along the spine-- lifted it, and banged it against the top and bottom of the metal shelf. Even with the carpeted floors, Rey could tell that the sound of these bangs carried. 

If Rey had been possible asleep in the library in what couldn’t have been an intentional position and suddenly awoken by something that could have been confused as a gunshot, she would have jerked up, apologized to anyone in the vicinity, and darted away before anyone who had seen her in such a ridiculous state could remember her face.

On the other hand, Ben Solo just slowly opened his eyes as if he were awaking from a pleasant dream.

Okay, if the dream had been pleasant, there probably would have been traces of a smile rather than a scowl scrawled across his face. 

“Can I help you?” His lips barely moved as the sarcastic question slipped between them. 

Why was he looking at her like she was the crazy person? She wasn’t the one surrounded by the ruins of some culture that used books as their building blocks. 

“I could ask you the same.” Rey thought consciously about her posture. Head up, shoulders back, feet firm. She gestured to the devastation that surrounded him. 

“I am engaged in very important research, so you know, and I needed to find…” His firmly enunciated words trailed off as his gaze returned to the shelf in front of him. A crease formed between his two eyebrows.

“Needed to find…?” 

He leaped off the ground, and Rey tried not to audibly gasp when his boot slipped across the pages of an innocent book that got in his way. He snatched the text she had carried around waiting for him to leave from where it stood alone on the shelf. “How is it here? It was not here before!” he snarled, to himself or to her, Rey was unsure. She was also unsure what or whom exactly “Galloglas” was, but she was confident that she had never seen someone appear so excited about a book about it (them?). 

Rey backed away as if retreating from a large predator that one encountered in the woods, content to return towards the end of her shift to amend this wreckage. If things went as planned, she didn’t want to be a memorable face in Ben Solo’s memory. She needed to just be background. 

As she slipped out of the aisle, Ben slid back to the floor, flipping frantically and evidently finding what he needed, if his hurried notes in a nearby notebook were any evidence. 

The blank page still stared at her at the circulation desk, but Rey returned to CU’s Greek Council website instead. She zoomed in on Ben Solo’s composite, contemplated how it was labeled “Kylo Ren.” Who was this guy? There had to be some connection between someone giving up their entire name-- and one linked people one would want to be associated with-- and the unsavory reputation of the frats. 

Unfortunately, it was not a connection Rey could discern by just staring at a picture. She typed a few halfhearted sentences describing the vibe of a frat party before reluctantly turning to her statistics practice. 

Rey dragged herself back up to the book warzone as the library warned that it would be closing in fifteen minutes. With her dreaded stats work done, reshelving no longer felt like a productive diversion; it just felt like work. 

However, when she turned onto the aisle where she was confident she had encountered Ben Solo, no pile of books waited for her. Rey peeked in the surrounding aisles, wondering if she made a mistake, but each one had clear floors. 

She ran her fingers along the stickers, wondering if someone had merely jammed them back on the shelves in no particular order, but there wasn’t a single edition out of place. 

One of the librarians must have caught the mess earlier. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is completely irrelevant to this chapter, but it is important and worth saying wherever, so just a reminder to anyone who may have stumbled across this piece that Black Lives Matter. 
> 
> If you came here for escapism, I totally get it. This is all exhausting. But this is also how we make changes. 
> 
> One of the things that has kept me from writing in the last few weeks has definitely been just a general feeling of sadness that I have had about the state of America. The good news is that I have now memorized my credit card number as I have found a whole bunch of organizations to donate to or have increased my donations to places I love. In case you haven't already seen it plastered everywhere, this is who I give to:  
> \- Equal Justice Initiative: fighting to end mass incarceration and raise awareness of America's history of lynching  
> \- Southern Poverty Law Center: does great work on an institutional as well as individual level  
> \- Reclaim the Block: Minneapolis group focused on reinvesting in long-term solutions rather than policing  
> \- Migizi: Minneapolis non-profit that works on creating opportunities for the indigenous population with a focus on media production. One of their buildings was burned during the riots.   
> \- Communities United Against Police Brutality: Basically what it sounds like in the Twin Cities.  
> \- Minnesota Freedom Fund: helps provide bail payment
> 
> My Minneapolis-based cousin suggested the last four of those, and the first two are ones I have felt passionate and have followed for a while. 
> 
> Additionally, I have been working on desegregating my social media, mostly with Instagram. Accounts I recommend: @weneeddiversebooks, @theconsciouskid, @colorofchange, @eji_org, @rachel.cargle, @mspackyetti, @laylafsaad, @sharynaholmes, @tayloralexxandra.
> 
> I add this not because I feel like I need to prove that I have done something, but in case you are looking for some additional resources!
> 
> I've definitely been actively thinking about the space I take up in this conversation, and I encourage you to do the same. When does my activism become performative? Am I really putting anything at stake by posting/saying/listening to this?
> 
> Maybe it's a cop-out that I put this as an end note rather than on the top of the page, which means you had to read what I wrote to get here rather than click away if you decided you didn't like my feelings on black lives. But if just one of you gets just a slightly different perspective from one of the sources I listed above or even just gives $5 to one of those organizations, it will have been worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> First Star Wars fic, so please comment and let me know how I'm doing!


End file.
